The major features of the contemporary world had been developed by 1900.

• Nationstates had become the most successful structure for managing territory, and they had spread throughout most of Europe and the Americas.

Some of these nation-states had industrialized (particularly those in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan) and used their newfound industrial might for imperialist military and economic reasons, colonizing much of Africa and most of Asia.

• Europeans, Americans, and Japanese had developed racist ideas of their superiority.

• The European whites as a result of a Christian "civilizing" mission combined with social Darwinism, and the Japanese as a result of their purported uniqueness in Asia—which contributed to colonizing programs and a belief that the world order was as it should be, with them on top.

The combustion of fossil fuels for industrial purposes was pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, continuing the process of changing that section of the biosphere into the "anthroposphere," where human actions began to have equal or greater influence than natural processes.

• The twentieth century would bring forth significant change.

• To be sure, we still live in a world of nation-states, industry, a rising disparity between the richest and poorest regions of the world as well as within individual countries, and escalating environmental issues.

• However, the early twenty-first century differs significantly from the early 1900s.

• Throughout the previous century, entire new industries emerged, profoundly reshaping the industrial world: oil and the vehicle; electricity and the telephone, radio, television, and computers; motors and airplanes, jets, and spacecraft.

The twentieth century saw new waves of industrialisation and its global spread.

• These clusters of inventions resulted in consumption habits that necessitated the use of enormous amounts of inexpensive fossil fuels, and the consequences of venting vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere became increasingly recorded in climate change and global warming.

• In addition to technological revolution and its economic and environmental effects, Western European governments would be dethroned by the middle of the twentieth century.

World Conflict I (1914-1918) rocked the late-nineteenth-century imperialist system to its core and had far-reaching effects for the development of the twentieth century as a century of war and brutality.

• However, it was World War II (1939-1945) that shattered not just the old European colonial system but also the new Japanese empire, resulting in a world divided into two superpowers:

• the United States and the Soviet Union (the USSR, or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics).

During the twentieth century, almost 200 million people died as a result of war, revolution, genocide, and other human-caused mass killings. 3 From 1914 to 1945, thirty years of crisis were marked by two world wars and a global economic breakdown known as the Great Depression.

• That contemporary world's "Thirty-Year Crisis" devastated Europe's global supremacy and Japan's Asian empire, paving the way for the establishment of two new superpowers (the United States and the Soviet Union) and their "Cold War."

The strange thing about the technologies of war used by imperialist governments against Asians, Africans, and indigenous peoples of the Americas during the nineteenth century was that the production of a critical component—gunpowder—was dependent on exceedingly slow natural processes.

• Europeans couldn't create nitrates, the chemical that made gunpowder explode, despite their factories' ability to produce steel, steam, and guns—they had to locate the raw elements in nature.

• Although European scientists had discovered that nitrogen is the important ingredient in nitrates, they had difficulties figuring out how to absorb nitrogen from the air and "fix" it into reactive nitrogen (Nr; see talks in chapters 1 and 5).

• Ironically, coal, steam, iron, and steel had helped industrializing countries to progress.

• By 1900, there was very little of the world left to be ruled by imperialist nations; the Chinese and Ottoman empires were the biggest unclaimed territories.

In the case of China, the Open Door Notes of 1900 led the imperialist powers to conclude that a weak Chinese state would allow them to enjoy the benefits of their "spheres of influence" without any of them actually having to conquer and govern China, a task made all the more difficult by competing powers aspiring to dominate the region, including the United States and Japan.

• Indeed, adoption of the Open Door Notes was supposed to have chilled competition among Asian imperialist countries and eliminated an irritant and potential threat.

A universal war would erupt among European nations, but the spark would be sparked not in Asia, but in the Balkans of southeastern Europe.

• In July 1914, a Serbian nationalist killed Archduke Ferdinand and his wife when they were touring Sarajevo, a Bosnian administrative hub that had recently been incorporated by the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

• Austria, backed by Germany and seeking to expand its empire, issued an ultimatum to Serbia, which was met with assistance from Russia.

• What made this little clash in the Balkans so combustible was that, in earlier years, imperialist rivalry and European power politics had resulted in a system of alliances, mostly in the Balkans.